Dr. Profits: How AI Is Saving Lives and Enriching Investors

Last month, a drug designed by artificial intelligence did something nobody asked it to do.

It appeared to make patients younger.

The drug is called rentosertib.

It was built by a company called Insilico Medicine to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a brutal lung disease with few good options.

AI picked the target.

AI designed the molecule.

And in a 12-week Phase 2 trial, patients on the highest dose saw their lung function improve, while patients on placebo kept getting worse.

Then researchers went back and ran the patients’ blood through six different “aging clocks,” models that estimate biological age from thousands of proteins in the blood.

All six moved in the same direction.

Patients on the 60-milligram dose came out looking roughly three years younger by some of those measures, according to results reported on September 12.

The placebo group barely budged.

Now, the researchers were careful to say the effect may simply come from a sick lung getting healthier.

Nobody is calling it an anti-aging pill yet.

But a Phase 3 trial with 320 patients was registered in July.

And the first wave of AI-designed medicines is starting to show real results in real people.

Big Pharma Has a $2 Billion Problem

To see why this matters, you have to understand how broken the old way of making drugs has become.

Bringing a single new drug to market now costs north of $2 billion, according to Deloitte.

It takes more than a decade.

And roughly 90% of the drug candidates that make it into human trials never get approved.

For most of history, our best medicines were found more or less by accident.

A mold on a petri dish… microbes in the soil… the bark of a yew tree in the Pacific Northwest…

That approach got us penicillin and Taxol.

It also got us an industry that spends more every year to discover less.

So where is all that research money going now?

Into computers.

The Drug Lab Is Moving Into the Data Center

In February, Eli Lilly switched on a supercomputer it calls LillyPod.

It runs on 1,016 of Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra chips and puts out more than 9,000 petaflops of AI performance.

“Now in the dry lab, you can test billions of molecule ideas at your fingertips,” said Yue Wang Webster, Lilly’s VP of R&D informatics.

A month later, Lilly signed a deal with Insilico worth up to $2.75 billion, with $115 million paid upfront.

Lilly is the most valuable drug company on the planet.

And it’s writing nine-figure checks to get access to somebody else’s AI.

That tells you exactly where the industry thinks the next blockbuster is coming from.

My colleague Keith Kohl has a name for this shift.

He calls it the “Quantum Quake.”

And he’s found a small company sitting right on the fault line.

The Company That Got There First

This firm was using AI to design drugs years before anyone had heard of ChatGPT.

It’s based in Salt Lake City, where it built one of the most powerful supercomputers in the drug industry together with Nvidia.

Nvidia also happens to be a shareholder.

Its system has mapped trillions of relationships between genes, cells, and chemical compounds, so its scientists can test ideas on screen before they ever touch a beaker.

Big Pharma is paying attention.

Roche and its Genentech unit have already paid this company more than $216 million in upfront and milestone payments.

Sanofi just triggered its fifth milestone on a cancer target.

All told, the company has collected more than $500 million from its partners so far.

And on September 24, it extended a data deal with Tempus AI through 2029, locking in $42 million in guaranteed fees.

The Pipeline Is Delivering

The most exciting program is a pill for familial adenomatous polyposis, an inherited condition that carpets the colon with polyps and almost always leads to colon cancer if left untreated.

There are no approved drugs for it.

None.

Patients typically end up having their colons removed.

In an ongoing Phase 2 trial, this company’s AI-discovered drug cut median polyp burden by 43% after just three months.

It’s now talking with the FDA about a registrational path.

And more Phase 2 data is due in November.

Behind that are a first-in-class cancer degrader in Phase 1 and a precision cancer drug that just got FDA clearance to begin human trials.

Meanwhile, the company is sitting on more than $500 million in cash, with very little debt and a runway into 2028.

Yet the stock trades for less than $5 a share.

That’s a tiny price for a company with Nvidia, Roche, and Sanofi in its corner, and a November catalyst on the calendar.

Keith has spent more than a decade trading biotech stocks around exactly these kinds of events.

He’s laid out everything he knows about this company in a new report for his Topline Trader service.

It includes the name, the ticker, his price targets, and the dates he expects to move the stock.

You can get the full details here.